Thursday 24 May 2012

Thursday Reading: Colossians 3:1-4

Key Verse: Colossians 3:3
3  For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

Devotion:
Imagine being told that you are dead! Whilst I do think that most of us would take words like that and try figure out what they actually mean, it is still a bit off-putting to be told that you are dead! But we are only put off because we limit our thoughts to our physical and maybe our spiritual worlds that we have come to know and hopefully understand a bit better. But this death that is being talked about is not the physical death that we will face one day, nor the spiritual death that we live (we are after all alive through the grace of God), but the fact that we should not be living in this world.

This world and all the people that make up this world are trusting in things that they see and feel. They do not all seek out the truth that God has given us and certainly do not all believe that truth if it is told them. It is the law of this land that we are dead toward. We should not be limited by the law of the land; but we should respect it and try to live within it for as much as it does not go against God’s Laws. There are many religions and sects in this world that will give you a myriad of things that must be done in order to please their god or their deity in some manner or form. Those laws do not promote our living God and hence we should not be limited to them or be constrained by them.

The disciples went to great lengths to make sure that the truth that God taught them was written down and given out to many more people. They knew full well that the Jewish leaders were the ones imposing their own rules on man instead of following God’s Laws. Jesus came to teach us the right ways because we were being trapped by our own imaginations and beginning to fall away from God because we thought our rules sounded better than those given to us through His original scriptures.

God’s Word never changes. We are the ones that bend things and massage the truth so that we can be pleased by what we wish to achieve rather than by what God has given us to do. It is a hard thing to accept God’s ways in everything because His ways are perfect and our imaginations certainly are not! God’s ways need to be sought after because the world has hidden His ways from us. The more we seek out His ways and find the truth, the more we should be willing to go out and tell others of those ways and that truth. God has set His Word in stone so that we can depend on it never changing – why should we try to change something that is already perfect?

Points to Ponder:
Do you change God’s rules?

How often do you change your own ways to line up with God’s ways?